Abby Martin Went To Israel. IT’S WORSE Than You Think
One of America’s most persistent independent journalists visited Israel, spent time inside its society, and left having abandoned a belief she held for her entire career.
Editorial Desk · April 8, 2026
What Abby Martin Found in Israel
Abby Martin has been covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict longer than most journalists working today. She founded Media Roots, spent years hosting The Empire Files, and made Gaza Fights for Freedom — a documentary she put on YouTube for free because she wanted as many people as possible to see it. She is not someone who goes into Israel expecting to be surprised. She knows this story. She has reported it for over a decade.
Which is what makes what she said after her visit so striking.
Speaking to Declassified UK, Martin said the thing that rattled her most was not the physical destruction in Gaza or the conduct of the military — it was the mood inside Israeli society. She had gone in expecting to find a public manipulated by state propaganda, citizens kept in the dark about what was being done in their name. That is, after all, how it usually works in countries conducting controversial military operations.
She did not find that.
| “They have a more honest media than in the United States. They see the footage. They know that the children are starving. They agree with it.”
— Abby Martin, Declassified UK, March 2026 |
That is the finding that keeps coming up in everything she has said since the visit. Not ignorance. Awareness. She compared the atmosphere to Berlin in the 1930s — and she was not being loose with the comparison. She meant it structurally: a society that has, in her reading, largely decided to support something that looks, from the outside, like a catastrophe, and done so with open eyes.
This is what she means when she describes Israeli society as “full-throated fascist.” Not reluctant. Not conflicted. Decided. A society operating with what she calls total impunity, sustained not by ignorance but by choice. The hatred, she argues, has become the culture. And a society that far gone, with the full protection of a global military empire behind it, does not self-correct.
The Belief She Abandoned
Martin told journalist Ahmed Eldin something that deserves to be taken seriously regardless of where you stand politically. She said: “I have always operated under the idea that people don’t know, and if they found out they would care and then they would act… I don’t believe that anymore.”
That is not a small thing to say. Her entire career has been built on the assumption that information changes minds. That if you show people what is actually happening, something shifts. She went to Israel and came back having dropped that assumption. The conflict, she now believes, is the most documented atrocity in modern history — filmed, shared, discussed constantly — and it has not produced the response she spent years expecting information to produce.
Whether or not you agree with her politics, that is a genuine and uncomfortable observation about how public opinion and media actually work in 2026.
Her Criticism of Western Journalism
She also went after Western newsrooms directly, particularly the New York Times, for what she describes as a pattern of language choices that soften the reality on the ground. She pointed out that over 270 Palestinian journalists have been killed since October 2023 and said to her fellow journalists: “How could you be silent about the systematic slaughter of your colleagues? This is about your profession.”
Her explanation for why governments have not acted more forcefully is not complicated: U.S. military and economic power punishes countries that step out of line. Leaders know the cost. That, she says, explains the silence better than any lack of awareness.
Martin’s move from ‘people don’t know’ to ‘people know and agree’ changes the analysis entirely. If the problem is ignorance, more journalism is the answer. If the problem is something else, nobody in the media class has a clear response ready.
What She Witnessed in Gaza
Standing inside Gaza, Martin’s account moves from the analytical to the visceral. She addresses the counter-narrative head-on — the talking point that food, water, and opportunity are available, that the humanitarian crisis is overstated or manufactured. She does not argue against it with statistics. She is standing there. She is looking. And what she sees bears no resemblance to what is being said in Washington or Tel Aviv.
The details she carries back are the kind that permanently alter the people who hear them. She describes parents carrying their children in plastic bags — the consequence of a healthcare and mortuary infrastructure so comprehensively destroyed that dignity in death has ceased to be available. There are no functioning hospitals sufficient to manage the scale of the dead. There is no cold storage. There are plastic bags.
| “No one’s going to forget what it looks like when Palestinians hold their children in plastic bags. No one can forget that.”
— Abby Martin |
She describes Israeli military drones broadcasting the recorded sound of a crying baby — a deliberate acoustic deception deployed to lure civilians, including children, out of shelter before strikes are called in. This is not contested allegation or inference. It is a documented tactic: a system engineered to weaponise parental instinct, to turn the most fundamental human impulse — the need to find a child in distress — into a kill mechanism. She describes it as cat and mouse. One side has the technology, the intelligence, and the impunity. The other has nowhere left to go.
| “I’m never going to forget the sound of a drone emitting a crying baby so it can massacre children who come out of their homes. No one’s going to forget that.”
— Abby Martin |
These are not the observations of someone who arrived in Gaza with a predetermined narrative to confirm. They are the observations of a journalist who has spent a decade on this story, who went back, and who found that the reality had outrun even her own prior reporting.
The Legislative Dimension
Beyond the cultural and the physical, Martin points to something that transforms argument into law. The Israeli Knesset has passed legislation permitting the execution of Palestinian prisoners — a provision explicitly not extended to Israeli citizens. The differential value of Palestinian and Israeli life is no longer a matter of policy implication, military practice, or media framing. It is statute. It has been written, debated, and passed.
This is the kind of detail that moves the conversation beyond rhetoric. One can dispute characterisations. One cannot dispute legislation. The law exists. Its text is explicit. And its implications — that the state has formally encoded the disposability of Palestinian life in its legal system — are precisely what Martin is pointing at when she invokes the language of the Fourth Reich. She is not reaching for a dramatic comparison. She is describing a structural reality: ethnic supremacy formalised in law, backed by overwhelming military power, and operating with the full protection of the most powerful state on earth.
The Collapse of the Propaganda Architecture
Martin’s broader conclusion is that the information architecture which long insulated Israel from serious international accountability has now collapsed entirely. Not because the world became more radical. Not because the opposition became more sophisticated. But because the sheer volume, consistency, and visibility of the evidence has made sustained denial structurally impossible.
The images have circulated too widely. The testimony is too consistent across too many independent sources. The statements made by Israeli officials are too candid. The official explanations are too visibly disconnected from what the world has watched in real time for over two years. The propaganda, she argues, has not been defeated by counter-propaganda. It has been defeated by reality.
Zionism, in her assessment, now exists only by the weight of a narrative that has ceased to function. It cannot last in its current form. You cannot expect internal reform from a society this far gone. The only remaining lever is external: international isolation, academic and cultural boycott, the active shaming of anyone — academics, celebrities, politicians — who normalises or legitimises what is happening. The world sees Israel for what it is. What happens next depends on whether seeing it is enough to compel action, or whether the watching continues while the dying does too.
| “The world sees Israel for what it is, and it can’t last for long in its current state. You cannot expect change in a society this far gone.”
— Abby Martin |
What to Take From This
Abby Martin went to Israel and Gaza. She went in as one of the most informed journalists working on this subject. She came back having dropped a belief she had held for her entire professional life — that information, if delivered clearly and honestly, produces conscience, and conscience produces action.
What she found instead was a society that has the information and has made its choice. A legal system that has encoded that choice in statute. A military that has turned civilian instinct into a targeting method. And a Western media and political class that has watched all of it and chosen, in the main, the management of optics over the acknowledgement of reality.
Her account is not comfortable. It is not designed to be. The best journalism never is. She went in. She looked. And she is making certain that looking has consequences — even if, for the first time in her career, she is no longer certain that it will.
